2. as the guarantee of the latter. It would be less absurd today to want to turn slaves into Spartans than to create Spartans by means of freedom. In former times, where there was freedom, people bore privation; today, everywhere there are privations, one would need slavery to get people to resign themselves to these. The people who most value the good things life has to offer, including its physical pleasures, are at the same time the only free people in Europe. Among the ancients, the enlightened class placed more importance on mores than on political freedom and the common people more importance on political freedom than on individual freedom. With us it is only, on the one hand, thinkers and, on the other, the common folk who place importance on political freedom. Say why.
Among the ancients the function of the citizen prosecutor was honorable. All citizens took this function upon themselves and sought to distinguish themselves in the accusation and pursuit of guilty people. With us the function of the prosecutor is odious. A man would be dishonored if he took on the function today without an official appointment. That is to say that among the ancients, public interest went before individual safety and freedom, while with us, individual safety and freedom go before the public interest.
1. After Rousseau. In his treatise on the government of Poland, J.-J. Rousseau brings out very shrewdly the obstacles which confront the introduction of new mores and habits in a nation and even the danger of starting up a struggle against these mores and habits. 166 Unfortunately, only his absolute principles have been taken up, his Spartan fanaticism, everything which was unworkable and tyrannical in his theories, and in this way, his most enthusiastic supporters and admirers, fixing on only what was defective about him, have managed to make him of all our writers the most fertile in false notions, in vague principles, and the one most dangerous for freedom.
2. institutions into habits. In enlightened times, observes Mr. Gibbon in his Miscellaneous Works, 167 men rarely run the risk of establishing customs recommendable only by their purpose and usefulness. The people who respectfully follow the wisdom of their ancestors, will despise that of their contemporaries and consider such institutions only from the point of view which would give rise to ridicule. For an institution to be efficacious, its author must be God or time. It could well be with institutions as with ghosts. No one has seen one, but everybody has among his ancestors someone who has seen one.
3. shame diminishes and honor withers. Bentham has included in his penal code 168 offenses against honor and reparations for these offenses. He has brought to this enumeration his characteristic penetration. His actual chapter on this subject, however, is a proof of the impossibility of doing anything by law which belongs solely to the domain of public opinion. He wants the man who thinks himself insulted to be able to force the alleged offender to declare that he had no intention of being scornful of him. The question, however, cannot be resolved before a court because the very supposition is humiliating. The response would not be, as Bentham supposes, a simple disclaimer, even in the case in which the intention to insult had not existed in the first place, because the disclaimer, being open to the charge of duress, is such that any man of honor would refuse it. Finally, the reparation laid down by the court could well be shameful for the defendant, but it would in no sense be honorable for the plaintiff. Public opinion must be left to itself with its drawbacks and advantages.
The ancients, having less need of individual freedom than we, attached the highest importance to laws about social mores. We give a comparable importance to constitutional mechanisms.
Among the Greeks and the Romans, the poor and the rich really formed two classes, of which one was composed of creditors, the other of debtors, and the inadequacy of the means of trade and production prevented these two classes from mixing. This meant that among the ancients insurrections were much more genuine than in our case. Now, that which is true is in all cases less violent than that which is artificial. An artificial insurrection, independently of the violence of an insurrection, has the further violence necessary to produce it; and moreover, calculation is much more immoral than nature. I have seen during the Revolution men who had organized artificial insurrections, suggesting massacres, to give the insurrection, they said, a popular or national air. When I see the blind confidence which many moderns have accorded the assertions of the ancients on the power of institutions and the series of conclusions they draw from some fact often reported as a vague rumor or contained without explanation in a single line, I am reminded of the traveler who, having seen an Arab prince who, having nothing better to do, whittled a stick with his knife, concluded from this that the thing was a fundamental and very wise institution of this State, namely that all men, including princes, learned a trade.
The ancients accepted their institutions as improvements. We struggle against ours as if they were imposed by conquest.
1. a singular error. “There has been a confusion,” says Montesquieu, XI, 2, “between the power of the people and the freedom of the people.” By an error of the same kind, Bentham regards as indirect means of government many things which are only the absence of all government intervention. He observes, for example, III, 7, that the rivalry between the Catholic and Protestant churches has contributed a lot to the reform of papal abuses; that free competition is the best way of lowering either the prices of goods or the rate of interest. It is, however, a complete abuse of vocabulary to call these things indirect means of government.
1. is something superfluous. In everything relating to man, we have to distinguish two things, the purpose and the means. In human societies, happiness is the purpose and security the means. Security is therefore not a good in itself. On the contrary, it has a number of drawbacks; but since it is the necessary means for achieving the purpose, we have to resign ourselves to its drawbacks. In private affairs, where the formalities we observe entail costs, delays, discussions, as well as in public affairs, where the authorization accorded to government restrains individual freedom, it would assuredly be more convenient to put our trust in the good faith and wisdom of each person. Public security is necessary, however, because the adverse results even of the perversity of a small number would be greater for all than that which results from formal prescriptions and agreed restrictions. Public security, though it is not an absolute good, is therefore a relative good, since it is of greater value than the evil it prevents. Two consequences flow from this. First, the security having to be complete and certain, in order to render it such we have to make all the indispensable sacrifices, but things must not go beyond that; since if it is right to endure necessary inconveniences, it is folly to add to them anything superfluous. Secondly, any system in which the disadvantages of security exceed the strict minimum is essentially vicious. Let us apply these principles to the political institution. We recognize its necessity, so we must accord it everything needed to make it secure. Everything it needs, I stress, but nothing that it does not need, such as what is demanded under various pretexts by the holders of various powers, ambitious delegates who never think their prerogatives sufficient either in intensity or extent.
2. are scarcely necessary. “In surrounding the sovereign with the necessity of being just, it will impose on the subject the obligation to submit.” Ferrand, I, 146.
3. excesses will reach their peak. The interest of a despot is never the same as that of his subjects. One single man clothed with despotic power has no means of governing according to his fantasy other than by brutalizing all those he governs. As long as we are not reduced to the level of simple machines, the possessor of power is threatened. Instruments reason. Agents have scruples. Those who have none pretend in order to raise their political price. Moreover, you cannot buy everybody. The despot is rich only from what he takes from his subjects. Now, those he buys want him to give them more than they had. Therefore to enrich some he must plunder others, either directly by taking their goods or indirectly by taxing them. The result of this is that, short of the brutalizing of everybody, there are always two classes under despotism who are not devoted to the government, the one which has been stripped of everything and is disgruntled, and that which without being plundered is not enriched. This one keeps its independence, and independence is as troublesome for despotism as disgruntlement.
4. a brilliant reign, during which France drained itself in continual wars, toward the end of which three million French people were persecuted, banished, treated with the most revolting barbarism, and after this reign, a long reign in which the most excessive corruption developed in which France lost her foreign reputation, in which the finances fell into irreparable disorder, in which all the elements of trouble, discontent, and overthrow accumulated to the point when the best-intentioned prince could not put them right, and then the most bloody of revolutions. Truly a fine outcome for the cruelties of Louis XI and Richelieu.
5. the French monarchy was overthrown. The following passage is curious to reread in the Mémoires of Louis XIV, when we reproach him with what happened seventy-four years after his death to his grandson. After having painted what he calls the wretchedness of kings who are not absolute, 169 he continues thus: “But I have spent too long on a reflection which will seem to you pointless or which can at most help you to recognize the wretchedness of our neighbors, since it applies all the time in the State where you are to reign after me. You will find no authority which is not honored to hold its origin and character from you, no administrative body whose opinions dare to deviate from terms of respect, no company which does not believe itself obliged to put its principal greatness in the good of serving you, and its sole security in its humble submission.” Mémoires, I, 62–63. 170 How difficult absolute monarchy is to maintain in a large State. Clovis established an absolute monarchy. Under his successors it divided and fragmented. The great lords became sovereign and Clovis’s line ended by being deprived of a royal authority, already virtually nullified. Charlemagne reestablished it. It disappeared again under Louis the Debonair, and the feudal system, one of the most opposed to monarchy as we understand it, rose on its ruins. A new revolution put Hugues Capet on the throne, but royal authority did not revive. It did not reestablish itself positively until the reign of Louis XIII, and a hundred fifty years later the monarchy fell.
6. Apologists for despotism. Do you want to judge despotism in relation to the different classes? For educated men think of the death of Traseus 171 and Seneca, for the common folk think of the burning of Rome and the devastation of the provinces, for the emperors themselves, of the death of Nero and that of Vitellius.
It is not true that despotism protects us against anarchy. We think it does only because for a long time our Europe has not seen a real despotism. But let us turn our gaze on the Roman empire after Constantine. We find that the legions were constantly in revolt, with generals proclaiming themselves emperors and nineteen pretenders to the crown simultaneously raising the flag of rebellion. Without going back to ancient history, let us look at the sort of spectacle presented by the territories ruled by the sultan.
When a violent revolution overthrows a despotic government, moderate men and men of peace judge despotism more favorably, first, because present ills make us forget past ones; secondly, because in centralized states revolutions are sometimes caused by government weakness, and that weakness, although fatal in its consequences, nevertheless gives to the governed temporary rights which they come to regard as the inherent advantages of absolute power while they are only the effects of its weakness and steps to its destruction.
If human wickedness is an argument against individual freedom, it is an even stronger one against despotism. The fact is, despotism is simply the freedom of the few against everybody else. Those governing have all the temptations and therefore all the vices of private men and power to boot.
A man can write good tragedies without being acquainted with the rules of dramatic art. If his tragedies are good, however, this is because he will have observed the rules without being aware of them. Similarly, a prince may make his people happy although in the constitution of the State there are no guarantees thereof. If this prince makes his people happy, however, it is because he conducts himself as if there were political guarantees in the constitution of the State. These examples prove the worthlessness neither of rules of art nor of political guarantees. They prove that one may act sometimes by instinct in ways consistent with these. From the very fact, however, that in acting thus one does well, it can be inferred that it would be better were these things known and established in advance. Political freedom is an art like all the others. Now, an art, as Laharpe puts it very well, Course in Literature, II, 252, is only the outcome of experience reduced to method. The purpose of this art is to spare those who follow us the whole road those who have preceded us followed, and which would have to be retrodden if we did not have guides. 172
“If we wanted,” says Louis XIV, I, 271, “to deprive ourselves of all things as soon as they might bring us any ill, we would soon be deprived, not only of everything which makes our greatness and our convenience, but also of everything which is most necessary to our subsistence. The foods which nature chooses for the nourishment of man serve sometimes to choke him. The most salutary remedies are infinitely harmful when they are badly managed. The most prudent laws often bring to birth new abuses, and religion, which ought to be only the object of our profoundest reverence, is itself liable to suffer the most terrible profanities from the world, and yet there is no one who would dare to conclude from all this that it would be better to go without meat, cures, laws, and religion.” Do not these arguments apply to freedom with as much force as to all these things?
Governments which have their origin in the national will, or what they name such, find themselves in an embarrassing situation with regard to resistance. If they declare that resistance is always a crime, they recognize that they have participated in this crime and have inherited its outcomes. If they affirm the legitimacy of resistance, they authorize it against their own acts, once they are unjust or illegal.
1. If the law created offenses. Those who claim that it is the law alone that creates offenses enter a vicious circle on this question: why is it an offense to disobey the law?
2. which he denies elsewhere. When we find, says Bentham, I, 5, 173 in the list of offenses some neutral action, some neutral action, some innocent pleasure, we must not hesitate to transfer this alleged offense to the class of legitimate acts, to grant our pity to alleged criminals and reserve our indignation for the so-called virtuous who persecute them.
3. retroactivity. Most bad laws are made only to serve a purpose demanding a retroactive effect. Almost all the laws which passionate feelings and factions produce would be void if they were not retroactive.
4. decorates with the name of law. Laws like those which wanted to force the French to leave their parents and children, separated from their country by political opinions, to perish of poverty and hunger in distant climes, raised against themselves all honest and generous sentiment. These impious laws are always evaded while they are extant, and repudiated with horror at the first moment of calm and freedom.
5. to a law he believes wicked. Ambitious or greedy men who want to be executors of bad laws say that in accepting power their aim is only to do as much good as possible; this means that they are ready to do all the wickedness they are commanded to do.
The Law of Solon: each citizen will be allowed to cut off the life not only of a tyrant and his accomplices but even of a magistrate who maintains his office after the destruction of democracy. Andocides, On Mysteries, 174 Travels of Anacharsis, Introduction, p. 120: a good law against instruments. 175
“To say that there is nothing just nor unjust save what positive laws ordain or forbid is to say that before any circle was drawn the radii were not all equal.” The Spirit of the Laws, I, 1.
1. and directs these means. “Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the ease with which the great number is governed by the small and the implicit submission with which men subordinate their feelings and their passions to those of their leaders. When we seek out, however, by what means this miracle is effected, we find that, since strength is always on the side of the governed, the governors never have any support save public opinion. It is therefore on public opinion alone that all government rests, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and to the most military as well as to the most popular and the freest. The sultans of Egypt and the Roman emperors might well have been able to drive their unarmed subjects before them like brute beasts; but when it came to their Praetorians or their Mamelukes, they had to act according to their views and interests.” Hume, Essays, IV, 27. 176 “Opinion is of two kinds, interested opinion, and opinion as to justice. The latter has always had much more influence than vested interest. This can easily be shown by the attachments all nations have to their ancient governments and even to the names which have received the sanction of Antiquity. Whatever unfavorable judgment we come to on the human race, it has always been profligate of its blood and its treasure, for what it thought was the maintenance of public justice. Probably at a first glance no proposition could seem more vitiated by the facts. Men, having joined a faction, violate shamelessly and remorselessly all the virtues of morality and justice in order to serve that faction; and yet, when a faction is securely grounded, people rest on the principles of law. It is then that men show the greatest perseverance and the greatest devotion to these principles.” Ibid. 177
When arbitrary governments oppress citizens, friends of freedom sometimes confuse the right of resistance with the right to mount a revolution. There is nevertheless a great difference, and this difference is very important. Resistance, properly called, tends simply to repulse oppression, 178 while the purpose of revolutions is to organize government under new forms. These two things are absolutely distinct. Resistance is a positive, individual, imprescriptible right which is subordinate only to considerations arising from utility, the chance of success, the danger of upset, and the comparison of the ill which it can entail with the one it wishes to prevent. To make a revolution, however, is never a right; it is a power with which one is accidentally cloaked. The evils of revolutions establish nothing against the legitimacy of resistance; the legitimacy of resistance establishes nothing in favor of revolutions. It has to be said, though, that since resistance often leads to revolutions, this danger must form part of the reckoning of the oppressed and encourage them either to tolerate the evil they suffer or to do what they can so that the resistance they put up does not entail excessively violent shocks and fatal upheavals. Revolutions and resistance, by nature distinct, are subject to totally different rules. An isolated man, a minority, has the right to resist. At all times when individuals are oppressed, it matters not whether they are a majority or a minority in society. In their respect the guarantee has been violated. If we rejected this opinion as disruptive, we would fall first of all into all the pitfalls of giving the majority endless power, since if majority acceptance could legitimate the oppression of the minority, there is all the more reason the positive will of the majority could have this result. Secondly, to permit resistance only when most people are repressed would be, regardless of the injustice of these arrangements, in fact to forbid resistance in all cases. The trick of governments which oppress citizens is to keep them separated from each other and to make communications difficult and coming together dangerous. Then oppression by the majority can never be identified. In sum, the nature of political guarantee is such that it cannot be violated in the case even of one person without its being destroyed for everybody. In matters of despotism, one single victim represents the whole collectivity. I do not speak here only of right. When it comes to its execution, it is clear that we have to bring circumstances into account. The exercise of our most obvious prerogatives must be subordinated to considerations of utility. Ill-considered recourse to force, even against the most outrageous encroachment, is fatal and must therefore be condemned. The man who, threatened with an arbitrary arrest, stirred up his village, would be guilty not for resisting but for his wild enterprise and the ills it could entail. If a minority or even a single man, however, has the right to resist, no minority of any sort ever has the right to stage a revolution.
From the absence of this distinction a great confusion of ideas has resulted. When today some unfortunate persecuted person uses the means still available to him to protest against despotism or evade it, he is not seen as a man under attack defending himself, but as aggressively ambitious; and oppressed people who invoke the help of the law are regarded as factions which infringe it. As happens commonly, the two opposing groups have seized on this confusion to take advantage of it. Oppressive governments have asked for nothing better than the depiction, as future usurpers, of those who resisted present usurpation; and those aspiring to tyranny have been quick to call themselves victims in order to legitimate their rebellions.
Resistance is legitimate anytime it is founded on justice, because justice is the same for everybody, for one person as for thirty million. A revolution is legitimate, however, just as it is useful, only when it is consistent with universal sentiment. This is because new institutions can be salutary and stable, in a word, free, only when they are desired by the whole society in which they are being introduced. The surest way for a government to gain the goodwill of public opinion is to leave it free. It is only ever tyranny which alienates the opinion of the majority; for the majority has nothing to gain from opposition to government. Therefore the less tyranny we have, the less risk will there be of the alienation of public opinion.
1. Therefore there is always a duty to fulfill. It is in persuading ourselves that it is useless to struggle against the violence of extraordinary situations, that we make them, indeed, irresistible. Each person says to himself: even if I fulfilled my duty, others would not fulfill theirs, and I would sacrifice myself fruitlessly. This reasoning results indeed in no one’s doing what he should. If on the contrary each man said to himself: even if other people did not fulfill their duty, I wish to fulfill mine, it would turn out that everybody would do as he ought. We create the impossibility of the good by resigning ourselves to this impossibility.
2. would bring it back down and it would collapse. The public spirit is the fruit of time. It forms through a long sequence of acquired ideas, sensations experienced, successive modifications, which are independent of men and are transmitted and modified again from one generation to another. The public spirit of 1789 was the result, not only of the writings of the eighteenth century, but of what our fathers had suffered under Louis XIV, our ancestors under Louis XIII. The public spirit is the heritage of the experiences of the nation, which adds to this heritage, its experiences of every day. To say that the public spirit must be re-created is to say that we must take the place of time, and this usurpation at least is beyond the usurpers’ power. The assemblies and political clubs have exactly that pretension, wishing to replace with superficialities what they are lacking in depth. They put themselves in the place of the people to make them say what they do not say. They take upon themselves the question, the answer, and even the praise which it seems to them their own opinion merits. There is always a public spirit, that is to say, a public will. Men can never be indifferent to their own fate nor lose interest in their futures. When governments do the opposite of what the people want, however, the latter grow weary of expressing it, and since a nation cannot, even through terror, be forced to tell itself lies, they say that the public spirit is asleep, holding themselves the while ready to choke it, if ever it should allow the suspicion that it is awake.
Enlightenment gets men to perceive a way forward from existing institutions; the disturbance revolutions cause either puts out the light or overreaches it.
The first device of the United Provinces after their uprising: a vessel without mast or sails, in the midst of the waves, with these words: incertum quo fata ferant. 179
The French revolutionaries have wanted, like Medea, to rejuvenate the old man in a bath of blood and the old man got out of the bath, as that had to be so, a thousand times older than before.
A revolution interrupts all inquiry and abstract reflection, all those patient works of the mind to which the human race owes its progress. Such works require security; their needs embrace the future. How shall one commit oneself to them when nothing guarantees a peaceful philosopher a day of life, an hour of tranquillity? Enlightenment requires impartiality and detachment. How does one stay impartial amid stirred-up passions, disinterested when all interests are compromised?
Against what abuses are revolutions directed? Against the subservience of public opinion. Are not opinions a thousand times more subservient, however, during and long after a revolution? Is not every word, every gesture, every outpouring of friendship, every cry of unhappiness attributed with a fearful influence? Has there ever been a revolution in which the discussion of the prevailing viewpoint has been allowed? You complain about attempts by the government to dominate thought, and is not such domination the very stuff of revolutions? You intend to make men free, and your method is to influence by fear! You inveigh against usurping governments, and you organize a government a thousand times more usurping in its principles and more terrible in its measures! Is slavery then a means of leading men to freedom? Is terror an education calculated to make them brave, independent, and magnanimous?
Revolutions make the power of the majority terrible; whereas in ordinary times the majority and the minority are day-to-day variable things, revolutions turn them, in a lasting way, into different parties of slaves and masters, oppressed and oppressors.
Popular factions treat public opinion with all the more contempt in that the leaders of these factions call themselves the people and therefore public opinion.
The wider the realm of education is, the less violent revolutions are. The more prejudices and vague notions subsist, the bitterer the struggle and the more doubtful success. A year of delay is a year gained. During this year, new truths can be discovered or truths formerly known but still locked up in a small number of heads can be more completely clarified or more universally spread. A few more of the facts can win over a thousand opponents.
When truths which are still within the grasp of only a few people are introduced violently and excessively into political institutions which must rest on general agreement, many men who rightly find fault with this dangerous haste are inclined to carry over their disapproval onto the truths which are its purpose. This disposition is natural; but it is out of place and can become disastrous. It is always by a false reckoning that one devotes oneself to a bad cause, whatever the reason for this effort. We must start from the proclaimed truth even if it is inconvenient. When this truth is cast unprepared into a working politics which should comprise only recognized truths, we ought, rather than striving in vain to restrain it, since it does not compromise, to surround it instead as quickly as possible with the factual backing it has not yet acquired. The impatient and impetuous men who have arrived at this truth only by instinct do not know how to give it this factual backup. By condemning oneself to defending error, one discredits reason and moderation itself. These two very precious things feel the effect of being used to support principles which are not perfectly and rigorously true, and the element of false reasoning to which they are linked reflects on them and weakens them. Anyway, some enlightened men do not take this approach. There are some who cleave to the principles right through the turbulence and dangers. The elite of the nation is divided. This very small minority finds itself split again. Equally respected names provide patronage to the two extreme parties, to the one which wants to retain the mistake as much as to the one which carries truth beyond limits. Disorder increases and is prolonged by the very fact that conscientious men are disunited on the means of repressing it.
There are times when all the harshnesses of freedom are of use to despotism.
1. in sybaritic voluptuousness. Revolutions destroy the equilibrium between obligations and sacrifices. What is in settled times only a simple straightforward duty becomes a courageous effort, a heroic act of devotion. In a storm, which threatens with death anyone who does not grasp hold of a plank, a raging egotism seizes each person. Each unfortunate soul struggling against the waves is afraid that one of his fellow unfortunates, attaching himself to him, may drag him to the depths of the sea. Likewise, in the imminent dangers of political convulsions, men untie themselves from everything which formerly united them. They are frightened that a friendly hand may slow them down as it rests on them. They separate themselves off in order to defend themselves the more easily. Wealth becomes the sole means of independence, the cardinal happiness, the unique hope of safety. People flatter themselves that their wealth is appeasing tyranny or that they are disarming its agents. Prestige is no longer sought. There exists neither glory for the powerful nor interest for the victim. Wealth is precious when it comes to leaving a country or when one fears a public crisis every day or a personal banishment. It is more sensible to ransom your life than to prove your innocence, to come to terms with the greed of your judges rather than convincing them at the level of justice. It is no longer a question of arguments but of motives, nor of truth, but of calculation. The absence of security detaches one at once from all sympathy for the sorrows of others and from all confidence in one’s own existence. Tenderness is stoically repudiated; people hurl themselves into sybaritic voluptuousness.
The oath sworn by the inhabitants of one of the Philippines: this is true, as it is true that one man never kills another.
Those who spoke of religious freedom were called fanatics. Those who spoke of persecutions were called philosophers. Lacretelle.
Political fanaticism struggles more over the cause than over the effect.
Let the friends of freedom never forget that if crime or persecution penetrate their army, it is freedom which will bear the judgment and, sooner or later, the innocent will bear the punishment of the guilty whom they thought were their allies.
Unhappiness consists less in the actual suffering which injustice causes its victims than in the contagious passions which it excites: vengeance, terror, foul lying, culpable expectation, shameful calculation. Injustice invokes these passions which hasten to her voice. They draft their cries of fury as legal decisions. They clothe their rage with abstract forms. Persecutors and persecuted, all of them thrash around hating each other, and suffering. He whom chance preserves from personal grief is diminished by the sight of the crime or consumed with indignation; and such is the condition of this nation whose general happiness was the sole concern of your vast conceits, and legitimated your outrages.
To have an opinion triumph, it is not enough to have it adopted blindly; it must be adopted in such a way that its very adoption turns upon itself. This is the case with fanaticism for freedom.
Suffering no longer figures in the reckoning of our discussion nor in our laws. At the time of the project for the deportation of the nobility, 180 no one pleaded the case as to the physical and moral pain with which this measure would strike down the proscribed caste. In the execution of the laws on conscription, 181 the unhappiness of old men losing at a stroke the last objects of their affections and the last resource of their wretched old age was treated with utter disdain; and even those who argued against the atrocious law of hostages 182 did not cite the suffering of the victims except as a secondary consideration. Any interest in the adversaries seemed to the party men a treason. Pity seemed seditious and sympathy conspiratorial.
The blood which revolutions spill is not the worst evil they cause. An earthquake which engulfs a hundred thousand individuals at a stroke is appalling only because of the sorrow of those who survive. When man perishes by the hand of man, however, death has very different and far more terrible effects. The depravity of murderers, the anguish of victims, the regret, the indignation, the rage of those who are robbed of the dearest objects of their affections, the resentments which pile up, the mistrust which spreads, the vengeance-seeking which erupts, the breaking of bonds, the punishments which call forth further punishments, such are the real misfortunes.
When it is an enraged people who are threatening the property and persons of the citizens, the latter can have recourse to the law, but when the law itself becomes the instrument of proscription, all is lost.
If you drag the people far from the moral order in order to achieve a purpose, how will you restore morality to the people, when the purpose is achieved?
1. mediocre talents. Thus Swift paints the Lilliputians for us, as they come running from all sides, surrounding Gulliver in their thousands as he sleeps on the ground, and taking advantage of his sleep to tie him up.
2. all the excesses of degradation. Certain men who reason soundly on a thousand questions do so badly on one particular and sometimes very important one. This disparity in their faculties and the way their logic suddenly abandons them thus are quite astonishing. The key to this unfortunate enigma is not in their intelligence but in their character. Their sophisms do not derive from errors but from a fact. Some circumstance has distorted their judgment, damaging some vital sensibility. On that day they were weak, cowardly maybe, and cowardice made them cruel. This memory haunts them, and their whole stance is only a generalized excuse, which we cannot understand as long as we do not know the circumstance.
A maxim of certain men: a revolution is a town taken by assault. Fools kill, wise men plunder.
3. never cut themselves off from freedom. It is never right to claim that the people’s wish is for despotism. They can be dropping with fatigue and want to rest awhile, just as the exhausted traveler can fall asleep in a wood although it is infested with brigands. This temporary stupor, however, cannot be taken for a stable condition.
“Most of the nations of Europe are still governed by moral rules. If, however, through long abuse of power or large-scale conquest, despotism established itself to a certain degree, there would be no moral rules nor moral climate left intact; and in that beautiful part of the world, human nature would suffer for a while the insults it already gets in the other three parts.” The Spirit of the Laws, Livre VIII, Ch. 8.
In some countries some people do not begin to pity the oppressed until they see that the latter have a chance of becoming oppressors.
If the soldier’s mission is perilous, who would dare say that the friend of freedom’s mission is without danger? The soldier fights in the open fields. He is filled with warlike audacity. He gives and receives honorable wounds. He dies covered with laurels. Who will tally the number of peaceful and selfless men, however, who, from the depth of their retirement, want to enlighten the world, and who, seized by tyrannies of all kinds, have died slowly in dungeons or at the stake? Only intellectual activity is always independent whatever the circumstances. Its nature is to survey the objects it is evaluating and to generalize on what it observes. Individuals count for nothing to intellectual activity, which is neither seduced by nor fears them. It takes up again across the centuries, despite revolutions and over the tombs of generations swallowed up by time, the great task of the search for truth. The courage of generals and the suppleness of ministers can serve tyranny and freedom alike. Thinking alone is unyielding. Never can despotism make it into an instrument, and hence arises the hatred which all tyrants bestow on it.
So redouble your efforts, eloquent, brave writers. Study the old elements of which human nature is composed. You will find everywhere morality and freedom in everything which at all times produced true emotions, in the characters which have served as the model for heroes, in the feelings which have served as an inspiration for eloquence, in everything which since the beginning of the world bound nations to their leaders and the esteem of posterity to the memories of past centuries. You will find these principles everywhere, serving some people with an ideal model, marking out for others the road to glory, and always gaining universal assent. And say all this well to government lest it gets it wrong. See page 493, above, Book XIII, Chapter 1, Addition.
What do perfidious interpretations and absurd objections matter to us? Do we not know that the men who attack us are of a different kind, speaking a different language from us? Of these, some were born just the way we see them. The others got that way by relentless work. They have broken with their own hands, by what they have striven successfully to do to themselves, everything in them that was noble and sensitive. They have acquired a degradation far better calculated and far more complete than those which nature alone had the responsibility for degrading. Between them and us there is nothing in common. We must pass through that ignoble rabble just as Captain Cook’s little troop crossed, amid the screams of the savages, the newly discovered islands. These courageous navigators have perished. Civilization, however, benefits from their conquests, and a grateful Europe deplores their loss.
No, never does a whole people become unworthy of freedom, never does a whole people give up on it. Amid times of the most profound degradation, when the impossibility of success forces even the bravest to inaction, there remain spirits which suffer and seethe in silence. Joy of a friend of liberty in Rome, during the election of the emperor. Tacitus.
Your sycophants can bring you in homage their cold irony against courage and virtue. You can ban courage and virtue from your presence. You will not banish them from the earth nor even from your empire. The hatred of oppression has been transmitted from age to age, under Dionysius of Syracuse, under Augustus, Domitian, under Louis XI and Charles IX.
There are beings to whom the spirit of evil seems to have said: I need you to frustrate everything which is good, to bring low everything which is high, to wither everything which is noble, and I endow you with a cold smile, an impassive look, skillful silence, and bitter irony.
The moral, philosophical, and literary system of the nineteenth century. A great revolution has taken place. It has had its effects, but it has also had its causes. To conserve the effects, that is to say, the power and the wealth that have been gained, to destroy the causes, that is to say, the principles. To seduce weak heads by the appearance of rational arguments, frivolous minds by elegance and luxury.
There is nothing more revolting than the laws of England relating to the settlement of the poor in the parishes. These laws, by obliging each parish to look after its poor, have at first the appearance of benevolence. Their effect, however, is that no poor person, or more precisely, poor man, having only his work for subsistence, can leave one parish to set up in another without the consent of the latter, a consent which he never obtains, an initial blow to individual freedom and a very serious blow, since such a man as cannot earn his living by the type of work he has adopted in the parish where he is domiciled is prevented from going to another where he would earn it more easily. The second result is that the poor rate in each parish, falling on all the individuals of that parish, leads everybody to be interested in opposing the moving in of a poor man or even one who, having only his work to support him, would be impoverished by illness or lack of employment. Hence there is persecution and harassment against the poor working man who tries to change his residence, a persecution demoralizing for those who carry it out, and cruel for him on whom it falls. Smith, I, 10. 183 As harassment always rebounds on its authors, the result of these contraints is often that one parish has a surplus of labor while another is in deficit. In this case the price of a day’s labor rises to an excessive level, and this increase is a burden to the same proprietors who, for fear of seeing the costs of maintaining the poor fall on them, are opposed to the setting up of individual workmen in their parish. Thus from society’s having intervened to ensure the subsistence of the poor, work has become difficult for them and they have been subjected to a number of vexations.
A bad decision by governments: when a town is poor, they believe that by setting up some establishment there, not on the basis of commerce or of industry but of luxury, they will enrich it. It is thus when it comes to reviving the poor towns of France or Holland, and the talk is of setting up bishoprics and law courts there, that is to say, men who consume without producing. See on this error and on the effect of these measures, Smith, II, Ch. 3. 184
Great nations are never impoverished through the prodigality and bad conduct of individuals, but sometimes very much so by those of their government. Smith III, 3, 185 and the reflections which follow on the system of luxuries and prices.
A State enriching itself only by productive consumption, the question is decided against luxury. See, on the disadvantages of unproductive consumption, Sismondi, I, 4. “The more the propertied classes maintain unproductive workers, the less they can maintain productive ones,” Sismondi, I, 4, 117. 186
If regulations are suppressed, said an apologist for prohibitions in the middle of the last century, sovereigns are no more than great men distinguished by a certain glamour, but marked by no utility. I understand. Rules are not made for the benefit of the governed, but so that those in government will not seem useless!
A government which wishes to seize hold of public opinion in order to control it is like Salmoneus who wanted to hurl a thunderbolt. 187 He made a great noise with his brass chariot and scared the passers-by with his flaming torches. One fine day the thunderbolt came out of the clouds and consumed him.
Et cum singulorum error publicum fecerit, singulorum errorem facit publicus. Seneca, Epistulae, 81. 188 With this difference, that in the first case there is less force.
“The need to study the countries of modern Europe in all respects, and the possibility of achieving a deep knowledge of their affairs, has always seemed to me to derive from one of the greatest ills of humanity. Indeed, if the ambition and greed of all governments just on their own force them to inform themselves carefully of their respective strengths, the motive which leads them at least in general to strive to know down to the most minute details that which concerns their own domains is neither more reasonable nor of a different nature; and if to avoid ruffling too vigorously men and their doings, I concede that there are a number of administrators in whom the mania for surveying everything in their country springs from a purer source, from the sincere desire the better to fulfill their duties, would I have any less the right to conclude from all this that their inquisitive activity is a great evil which derives from that other murderous sickness of wanting to overgovern? When those who rule empires hold to good principles, there are two concerns only: maintaining external peace by a good system of defense, and conserving domestic order through the exact, impartial, and unvarying administration of justice. Everything else will be left to individual effort, whose irresistible influence, bringing about a greater sum of access to various rights for each citizen, will unfailingly produce a larger quantity of public happiness. No sovereign, no minister, no committee, can on his own know the business of a thousand men, and each individual sees his own very well in general.” Mirabeau, Prussian Monarchy, Introduction. 189
Mistakes in legislation are a thousand times more disastrous than all other calamities. The implication is that we must reduce as far as possible the chance of these mistakes. Now, if the only purposes of the government are preservation and public safety, the chance of mistakes will be considerably reduced. There are just a few simple means for achieving public security and preservation. For the improvement of happiness, there are complicated and countless ones. If the government gets the former wrong, its error is only negative, as also are the consequences of this error. It does not do all it should, it does not attain in everything the purpose it ought to, but the bad that faults of this nature entail is reparable. This is an ill whose effect ceases with its cause. If, on the contrary, the government gets its attempts at improvement wrong (and as I said, there are a thousand times more chances of making mistakes following this course), its errors are prolonged, men adapt to them, habits form, interests gather around this corrupt nexus, and when the mistake is recognized, it is almost as dangerous to destroy it as to let it continue. In this way mistakes of this second kind produce ills whose intensity and duration are incalculable. Not only do they entail ills qua authorized mistakes, they entail even more of them when they are recognized. Government often hesitates to destroy them. In that case, vacillating and indecisive, it acts very uncertainly, making despotism bear down on all the citizens. Finally, new problems appear even when the government has made its mind up. Decisions are reversed, the agreed links are torn apart, customary behavior is offended, and public trust is shaken.
“Compare the effects in governments which obstruct the publication of thought and those which give it free rein. You have on one side Spain, Portugal, Italy. You have on the other England, Holland, and North America. Where is there more decency and happiness? In which of these is more crime committed? In which is society more gentle?” Bentham, III, 20.
“What is a censor? It is an interested judge, an unrivalled judge, an arbitrary one who conducts clandestine proceedings, condemns without hearing, and decides without appeal.” Bentham, III, 22.
Between the lawmaker and the member of government, when one or the other exceeds his prerogative, there is this difference, that the legislator has a ferocious pride and the minister a puerile vanity. The one wants to be obeyed rather than flattered, because flattery coming from many people will convince him less of his merit than obedience would. The other likes to be flattered more than he wishes to be obeyed, because to dispense with obedience after having demanded it would seem to him a second proof of power.
The lawmaker’s clumsiness, says Bentham, often itself creates an opposition between the natural and the political sanction, III, 24. 190 He therefore admits that there are natural sanctions.
One can say in general of all banks, as much of deposit banks as of those which issue bills, for whose value they are supposed to have the cash, what Say says, Livre II, Ch. 14, 191 of deposit banks only. “It has been called into question whether such a thing could survive in a State whose government was without responsibility or limits. Only public opinion can decide on a question of that sort. Everyone may have an opinion, but no one is obliged to disclose it.”
Ganilh shows manifestly, in his digression on public credit, II, 224–251, 192 that this essential and so to speak unique agent is incompatible with absolute power.
Banks, said Montesquieu, are incompatible with pure monarchy. This is to say, in other words, that credit is incompatible with arbitrary power.
The same men who, touchy zealots of independence, when they struggle against the government, believe they cannot check its powers sufficiently, exhaust themselves in multiplying and enlarging them, when from being opponents of governments they become its inheritors. It is in the writings of the most austere reformers, the most implacable enemies of existing institutions, that one finds the most absolute principles on the jurisdiction of political authority.